Spirituality: Its Uses and Misuses

What does it mean to ask about the uses and misuses of spirituality? The very title of this symposium might suggest that our primary concerns have to do with patrolling the boundaries and establishing clear lines of demarcation between authentic and inauthentic, coherent and incoherent, morally sound and immoral or amoral spiritual ideas and practices. That faith communities have long been concerned with questions of normativity does little to allay fears in the contemporary mind that such questions have as much to do with the exercise of authority and suspicion of difference as they do with understanding and describing spiritual experience on its own terms, in all its maddening complexity and ambiguity. One could rightly ask: on what grounds are such questions being posed? On behalf of whose interests? And by whose authority?